The Age of Faith

  This Duns was one of the keenest minds in medieval history. Having studied mathematics and other sciences, and feeling the influence of Grosseteste and Roger Bacon at Oxford, he formed a severe notion of what constituted proof; and applying that test to the philosophy of Thomas, he ended, almost in its honeymoon, the rash marriage of theology with philosophy. Despite his clear understanding of the inductive method, Duns argued —precisely contrary to Francis Bacon—that all inductive or a posteriori proof—from effect to cause—is uncertain; that the only real proof is deductive and a priori—to show that certain effects must follow from the essential nature of the cause. For example, to prove the existence of God, we must first study metaphysics—i.e., study “being as being,” and by strict logic arrive at the essential qualities of the world. In the realm of essences there must be one which is the source of all the rest, the Primus; this First Being is God. Duns agrees with Thomas that God is Actus Purus, but he interprets the phrase not as Pure Actuality but as Pure Activity. God is primarily will rather than intellect. He is the cause of all causes, and is eternal. But that is all that we can know of Him by reason. That He is a God of Mercy, that He is Three in One, that He created the world in time, that He watches over all by Providence—these and practically all the doctrines of the Christian faith are credibilia; they should be believed on the authority of the Scriptures and the Church, but they cannot be demonstrated by reason. Indeed, the moment we begin to reason about God we run into baffling contradictions (the Kantian “antinomies of pure reason”). If God is omnipotent He is the cause of all defects, including all evil; and secondary causes, including the human will, are illusory. In view of these ruinous conclusions, and because of the necessity of religious belief for our moral life (Kant’s “practical reason”), it is wiser to abandon the Thomistic attempt to prove theology by philosophy, and to accept the dogmas of the faith on the authority of the Bible and the Church.145 We cannot know God, but we can love Him, and that is better than knowing.146

  In psychology Duns is a “realist” after his own subtle fashion: universals are objectively real in the sense that those identical features, which the mind abstracts from similar objects to form a general idea, must be in the objects, else how could we perceive and abstract them? He agrees with Thomas that all natural knowledge is derived from sensation. For the rest he differs from him all along the psychologic line. The principle of individuation is not matter but form, and form only in the strict sense of thisness (haecceitas)—the peculiar qualities and distinguishing marks of the individual person or thing. The faculties of the soul are not distinct from one another, nor from the soul itself. The basic faculty of the soul is not understanding but will; it is the will that determines to what sensations or purposes the intellect is to attend; only the will (voluntas), not the judgment (arbitrium), is free. Thomas’ argument that our hunger for continuance and for perfect happiness proves the immortality of the soul proves too much, for it could be applied to any beast in the field. We cannot prove personal immortality; we must simply believe.147

  As the Franciscans had claimed to see in Thomas the victory of Aristotle over the Gospels, so the Dominicans might have seen in Duns the triumph of Arabic over Christian philosophy: his metaphysic is Avicenna’s, his cosmology is Ibn Gabirol’s. But the tragic and basic fact in Scotus is his abandonment of the attempt to prove the basic Christian doctrines by reason. His followers carried the matter further, and removed one after another of the articles of faith from the sphere of reason, and so multiplied his distinctions and subtleties that in England a “Dunsman” came to mean a hairsplitting fool, a dull sophist, a dunce. Those who had learned to love philosophy refused to be subordinated to theologians who rejected philosophy; the two studies quarreled and parted; and the rejection of reason by faith issued in the rejection of faith by reason. So ended, for the Age of Faith, the brave adventure.

  Scholasticism was a Greek tragedy, whose nemesis lurked in its essence. The attempt to establish the faith by reason implicitly acknowledged the authority of reason; the admission, by Duns Scotus and others, that the faith could not be established by reason shattered Scholasticism, and so weakened the faith that in the fourteenth century revolt broke out all along the doctrinal and ecclesiastical line. Aristotle’s philosophy was a Greek gift to Latin Christendom, a Trojan horse concealing a thousand hostile elements. These seeds of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were not only “the revenge of paganism” over Christianity, they were also the unwitting revenge of Islam; invaded in Palestine, and driven from nearly all of Spain, the Moslems transmitted their science and philosophy to Western Europe, and it proved to be a disintegrating force; it was Avicenna and Averroës, as well as Aristotle, who infected Christianity with the germs of rationalism.

  But no perspective can dim the splendor of the Scholastic enterprise. It was an undertaking as bold and rash as youth, and had youth’s faults of over-confidence and love of argument; it was the voice of a new adolescent Europe that had rediscovered the exciting game of reason. Despite heresy-hunting councils and inquisitors, Scholasticism enjoyed and displayed, during the two centuries of its exaltation, a freedom of inquiry, thought, and teaching hardly surpassed in the universities of Europe today. With the help of the jurists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it sharpened the Western mind by forging the tools and terms of logic, and by such subtle reasoning as nothing in pagan philosophy could excel. Certainly this facility in argument ran to excess, and generated the disputatious verbosity and “scholastic” hairsplitting against which not only Roger and Francis Bacon, but the Middle Ages themselves, rebelled.* Yet the good of the inheritance far outweighed the bad. “Logic, ethics, and metaphysics,” said Condorcet, “owe to Scholasticism a precision unknown to the ancients themselves”; and “it is to the Schoolmen,” said Sir William Hamilton, “that the vulgar languages are indebted for what precision and analytical subtlety they possess.”149 The peculiar quality of the French mind—its love of logic, its clarity, its finesse—was in large measure formed by the heyday of logic in the schools of medieval France.150

  Scholasticism, which in the seventeenth century was to be an obstacle to the development of the European mind, was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a revolutionary advance, or restoration, in human thought. “Modern” thought begins with the rationalism of Abélard, reaches its first peak in the clarity and enterprise of Thomas Aquinas, sustains a passing defeat in Duns Scotus, rises again with Occam, captures the papacy in Leo X, captures Christianity in Erasmus, laughs in Rabelais, smiles in Montaigne, runs riot in Voltaire, triumphs sardonically in Hume, and mourns its victory in Anatole France. It was the medieval dash into reason that founded that brilliant and reckless dynasty.

  CHAPTER XXXVII

  Christian Science

  1095–1300

  I. THE MAGICAL ENVIRONMENT

  THE Romans at their Imperial height had valued applied science, but had almost forgotten the pure science of the Greeks. Already in the Natural History of the elder Pliny we find supposedly medieval superstitions on every other page. The indifference of the Romans co-operated with that of the Christians to almost dry up the stream of science long before the barbarian invasions littered the routes of cultural transmission with the debris of a ruined society. What remained of Greek science in Europe was buried in the libraries of Constantinople, and that remnant suffered in the sack of 1204. Greek science migrated through Syria into Islam in the ninth century, and stirred Moslem thought to one of the most remarkable cultural awakenings in history, while Christian Europe struggled to lift itself out of barbarism and superstition.

  Science and philosophy, in the medieval West, had to grow up in such an atmosphere of myth, legend, miracle, omens, demons, prodigies, magic, astrology, divination, and sorcery as comes only in ages of chaos and fear. All these had existed in the pagan world, and exist today, but tempered by a civilized humor and enlightenment. They were strong in the Semitic world, and triumphed after Averroës and Mai
monides. In Western Europe, from the sixth to the eleventh century, they broke the dikes of culture, and overwhelmed the medieval mind in an ocean of occultism and credulity. The greatest, most learned men shared in this credulity: Augustine thought that the pagan gods still existed as demons, and that fauns and satyrs were real;1 Abélard thought that demons can work magic through their intimate acquaintance with the secrets of nature;2 Alfonso the Wise accepted magic, and sanctioned divination by the stars;3 how, then, should lesser men doubt?

  A multitude of mysterious and supernatural beings had descended into Christianity from pagan antiquity, and were still coming into it from Germany, Scandinavia, and Ireland as trolls, elves, giants, fairies, goblins, gnomes, ogres, banshees, mysterious dragons, blood-sucking vampires; and new superstitions were always entering Europe from the East. Dead men walked the air as ghosts; men who had sold themselves to the Devil roamed woods and fields as werewolves; the souls of children dead before baptism haunted the marshes as will-o’-the-wisps. When St. Edmund Rich saw a flight of black crows he recognized them at once as a flock of devils come to fetch the soul of a local usurer.4 When a demon is exorcised from a man, said many a medieval story, a big black fly—sometimes a dog—could be seen issuing from his mouth.5 The population of devils never declined.

  A hundred objects—herbs, stones, amulets, rings, gems—were worn for their magic power to ward off devils and bring good luck. The horseshoe was lucky because it had the shape of the crescent moon, which had once been a goddess. Sailors, at the mercy of the elements, and peasants, subject to all the whims of earth and sky, saw the supernatural at every turn, and lived in a vital medium of superstitions. The attribution of magic powers to certain numbers came down from Pythagoras through the Christian Fathers: three, the number of the Trinity, was the holiest number, and stood for the soul; four represented the body; seven, their sum, symbolized the complete man; hence a predilection for seven—ages of man, planets, sacraments, cardinal virtues, deadly sins. A sneeze at the wrong time was a bad omen, and had better be disarmed with a “God bless you” in any case. Philters could be used to create or destroy love. Conception could be avoided by spitting thrice into the mouth of a frog, or holding a jasper pebble in the hand during coitus.6 The enlightened Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons in the ninth century, complained that “things of such absurdity are believed by Christians as no one ever aforetime could induce the heathen to believe.”7

  The Church struggled against the paganism of superstition, condemned many beliefs and practices, and punished them with a gradation of penances. She denounced black magic—resort to demons to obtain power over events; but it flourished in a thousand secret places. Its practitioners circulated privately a Liber perditionis, or Book of Damnation, giving the names, habitats, and special powers of the major demons.8 Nearly everybody believed in some magical means of turning the power of supernatural beings to a desired end. John of Salisbury tells of magic used by a deacon, a priest, and an archbishop.9 The simplest form was by incantation; a formula was recited, usually several times; by such formulas a miscarriage might be averted, a sickness healed, an enemy put out of the way. Probably the majority of Christians considered the sign of the cross, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ave Maria as magic incantations, and used holy water and the sacraments as magic rites bringing miraculous effects.

  Belief in witchcraft was next to universal. The Penitential Book of the bishop of Exeter condemned women “who profess to be able to change men’s minds by sorcery and enchantments, as from hate to love or from love to hate, or to bewitch or steal men’s goods,” or who “profess to ride on certain nights and on certain beasts with a host of demons in women’s shape, and to be enrolled in the company of such”10—the “Witches’ Sabbath” that became notorious in the fourteenth century. A simple witchery consisted in making a wax model of an intended victim, piercing it with needles, and pronouncing formulas of cursing; a minister of Philip IV was accused of hiring a witch to do this to an image of the King. Some women were believed able to injure or kill by a look of their “evil eye.” Berthold of Regensburg thought that more women than men would go to hell because so many women practiced witchcraft—“spells for getting a husband, spells for the marriage, spells before the child is born, spells before the christening… it is a marvel that men lose not their wits for the monstrous witchcrafts that women practice on them.”11 Visigothic law accused witches of invoking demons, sacrificing to devils, causing storms, etc., and ordered that those convicted of such offenses should have their heads shaved and receive two hundred stripes.12 The laws of Cnut in England recognized the possibility of slaying a person by magic means. The Church was at first lenient with these popular beliefs, looking upon them as pagan survivals that would die out; on the contrary they grew and spread; and in 1298 the Inquisition began its campaign to suppress witchcraft by burning women at the stake. Many theologians sincerely believed that certain women were in league with demons, and that the faithful must be protected from their spells. Caesarius of Heister-bach assures us that in his time many men entered into pacts with devils;13 and it is alleged that such practitioners of black magic so disdained the Church that they travestied her rites by worshiping Satan in a Black Mass.14 Thousands of sick or timid people believed themselves to be possessed by devils. The prayers, formulas, and ceremonies of exorcism used by the Church may have been intended as psychological medicine to calm superstitious minds.

  Medieval medicine was in some measure a branch of theology and ritual. Augustine thought that the diseases of mankind were caused by demons, and Luther agreed with him; it seemed logical, therefore, to cure illness with prayer, and epidemics by religious processions or building churches. So Santa Maria della Salute at Venice was raised to check a plague, and the prayers of St. Gerbold, Bishop of Bayeux, cured that city of an epidemic of dysentery.15 Good physicians welcomed the aid of religious faith in effecting cures; they recommended prayer, and the wearing of amulets.16 As far back as Edward the Confessor we find English rulers blessing rings for the cure of epilepsy.17 Kings, having been consecrated by religious touch, felt that they might cure by imposition of hands. Persons suffering from scrofula were supposed to be especially amenable to the royal touch; hence the name “king’s evil” for that ailment. St. Louis labored assiduously with such impositions; and Philip of Valois is said to have “touched” 1,500 persons at one sitting.18

  There were magical means to knowledge as well as to health. Most of the old pagan methods for divining the future or seeing the absent flourished throughout the Middle Ages despite repeated condemnation by the Church. Thomas à Becket, wishing to advise Henry II about a contemplated invasion of Brittany, consulted an aruspex, who foretold the future by watching the flight of birds, and a chiromancer, who predicted by studying the lines of the hand.19 This art of palmistry claimed divine sanction from a verse in Exodus (xiii, 9): “It shall be for a sign unto thee upon thine hand.” Other prophets tried to foretell events by observing the movements of the winds (aëromancy) or the waters (hydromancy), or the smoke rising from a fire (pyromancy). Some, imitating the Moslems, marked points at random upon the earth (or upon any writing material), connected the points with lines, and told fortunes from the geometrical figures so formed (geomancy). Some, it was alleged, learned the future from the evoked dead (necromancy); Albertus Grotus, at the request of Frederick Barbarossa, evoked (we are told) the spirit of the Emperor’s wife.20 Some consulted prophetic books, like those purporting to contain the predictions of the Sibyls, or Merlin, or Solomon. Some opened the Bible at random (sortes sanctorum) or the Aeneid (sortes vergilianae), and told the future from the first verse seen. The gravest medieval historians nearly always found (like Livy) that important events had been directly or symbolically foretold by portents, visions, prophecies, or dreams. There were heaps of books—e.g., one by Arnold of Villanova—offering the latest scientific interpretation of dreams (oneiromancy)—not much sillier than those which famous scientists have written in the twe
ntieth century. Nearly all these modes of divination or clairvoyance had been practiced in antiquity, and are practiced today.

  But our time, despite some effort, has not yet equaled the Age of Faith—in Islam, Judaism, or Christendom—in belief that the future is decipherably written in the stars. If the climate of the earth, and the growth of plants, could be so clearly-influenced by the heavenly bodies, why should not these affect—nay, determine—the growth, nature, illnesses, periods, fertility, epidemics, revolutions, and destinies of men or states? So nearly every medieval mind believed. A professional astrologer could be found in the household of almost every prince or king. Doctors bled their patients, as many farmers still plant their seeds, according to phases of the moon. Most universities gave courses in astrology, meaning by it the science of the stars; astronomy was included in astrology, and progressed largely through astrologic interest and aims. Sanguine students professed to have found predictable regularities in the effects of celestial bodies on the earth. Persons born under the ascendancy of Saturn would be cold, cheerless, saturnine; those born under Jupiter, temperate and jovial; under Mars, ardent and martial; under Venus, tender and fruitful; under. Mercury, inconstant, mercurial; under a high moon, melancholy almost to the point of lunacy. Genethlialogy predicted the entire life of the individual from the position of the constellations at his birth. To draw a proper horoscope, therefore, one had to observe the hour, take the precise moment of birth, the precise position of the stars. Astronomic tables were compiled chiefly to aid the drawing of such horoscopes.